By Lauren Catanese

“All you need you is love!” We’ve all heard the Beatles classic and whenever I do I am reminded that it’s true. Love really is all we need. There are many expressions and ways to feel love. The love between parents and their children, love of nature, family, friends, hobbies, and passions. But for this article, I wanted to focus on love in the romantic relationship context. That holiday we all know as Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. To some it’s the time to bulk buy the red and pink streamers, roses and chocolates. Meanwhile, some may just roll their eyes. Now, I don’t think we have to wait around for a holiday to show our love, but sometimes it’s fun to celebrate the only emotion that really matters in this world in an over the top exaggerated way.

Whether you are single, (here here), or in a relationship, we all have moments where we have felt the opposite of this emotion, unloved. If love is all around us then why are we not feeling it? Could it be because we are not allowing it? Maybe we’re scared.  Perhaps we got hurt, and don’t want the past to repeat itself. Brad Yates says, “To the extent that you are not experiencing an emotion is to the extent in which you are resisting it.” Don’t roll your eyes just yet, stay with me here. So, why would we block love? Maybe it’s because somewhere inside us is this notion that we not good enough, we are unlovable, or that love is not safe.

Before I was married, I had been in single status for a very long time.  Maybe it’s because I’m a mom and I devote much of my time to my son. As many other local single women would say, perhaps it’s due to the reported shortage of available men? Maybe. But I have a different theory altogether and when it occurred to me as an “aha moment,” I knew it was time for me to change if I wanted my love life to.

Liesel Rigsby, known as the “Energetic Matchmaker,” from Los Angeles is a pretty phenomenal woman. I was told about her from one of my best friends, an intuitive who lives in Australia. Liesel is the founder of Soulmate School. An online course that helps woman find their way to love. Her approach to why women are not in the relationship they want to be in and why they keep finding themselves dating the same type of guy over and over is because they need to clear the energetic blocks first, in order to attract a soul mate.  She quotes Rumi, “Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” 

The first quest in the school is to learn to love yourself wholly and fully. This, of course, applies to both men and women. It’s something we have heard our whole lives. It’s simple and seems relatively easy but there is a lot more to it. On your quest to loving yourself you will have to first dig up and admit all the reasons why you feel you don’t deserve what is your God given right, to love and be loved. It’s a shift in consciousness.  But by falling ‘oh so’ in love with yourself, and feeling full of love just as you are, you send a vibration out into the world that says, I feel loved. I know I am loved just as I am. I am lovable. What comes back to you is more experiences in your life and when they occur, you feel loved.It’s never a forced feeling but you need to get to a point in your life when you can honestly feel love and admiration for yourself, your whole self! Yes, everything that makes you-you!  All the good and what you think others would judge as bad. You are lovable. We are all a work in progress and the sooner we get to the point of accepting one another and learning to open up to this thing called love versus judging, the sooner we get to this point of inner balance and peace- to love.

No matter what has happened in my life, what heartaches I have endured or witnessed, I still believe in love, “a love that time will stand still for,” as quoted from one of my favorite movies, Practical Magic.  I realize now that my love life is going to change because my actions, feelings, and emotions around it  are changing first. We are created from love so how to feel it and be it is in us all already. It is our inherent nature. There’s a little spark within that somehow always helps us find our way to it. That emotion that cannot help itself but to come out and overstock on heart cards and candy. So believe in love. Don’t let any situation or person take that away from you. Don’t give away that power. Learn to love and accept yourself. Because “all you need is love.”

And for Pete’s sake, it’s February and Valentine’s is just around the corner.

The post Lotus Life; Love is in the Air! appeared first on South Walton Life | 30A News, Events and Community Information.